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My Fulbright Life
Transcript For: Fulbrighter Josh Meltzer discusses his Fulbright Experience in Mexico
July 21, 2009
Fulbrighter Josh Meltzer discusses his Fulbright Experience in Mexico with Lee Rivers.
Josh Meltzer , Mexico.
Lee: Hello and welcome to this
edition of My Fulbright Life. I’m your host Lee Rivers and I want to thank you
for your listening support.
Today I’m joined by Josh
Meltzer and he’s going to speak a little bit about his Fulbright experience in Mexico.
Thanks for joining me today Josh.
Josh: It’s my pleasure. Thanks for
the time.
Lee: So I really appreciate you
taking some time and chatting with me. I guess I’ll just start off by asking
you where you currently are, and then if you could explain a little bit about
what you’re doing with your program, and then I’ll go into the other questions.
Is that cool?
Josh: Yeah, sure. Where I am is in Guadalajara, Mexico
which is the second largest city in Mexico so it’s a big urban
environment. And essentially my project here is a story, a picture story, a
multimedia story that I’m working on about migration within Mexico of primarily indigenous
families. So, the idea is to find some stories that I can tell through
individual people or families, very personal stories about their experiences
having moved from rural regions of Mexico
to Guadalajara
and how that’s changed their lives for better or for worse. And each story that
I’ve found- I have about 6 or 7 that I’m working on- has a little bit of
different, you know, pitch to it. Different reason for moving, maybe life
situation, coming from a different place. So that way I’m able to tell a little
bit of a cross section of how life has been for the families here. The other
thing that I’m doing is teaching a class to kids between the ages of about 11 –
16 a photo class, basically a photojournalism class. And the kids that are in
the class are all part of an organization called Codeni which is a children’s
rights organization here. Children will work with their families, with their
parents in the street and Codeni is an organization that is basically centered
around their education, and helping them get and staying enrolled in school and
helping them find scholarships to pay for the cost of education. So, they’re
all part of that and we’ve got about 15 cameras that we got through an
organization called Listen to My Pictures which is an organization that
supports small photo education projects throughout the world for kids that have
never used cameras. So that’s been really fantastic because that’s something
I’ve always wanted to do and now I have the time and the resources and the kids
do it and they’ve been great. So we meet basically once a week and we edit
through the pictures that they’ve shot during the week. And we show examples of
professional’s work and have guest visitors, we go to museum shows and it’s
been a great experience really.
So mainly I’m shooting
and doing my own documentary project and the side part is the teaching.
Lee: Nice. And so before you began
your Fulbright, what was your proficiency in the language? Did you take Spanish
classes in the past?
Josh: My proficiency was pretty
minimal. I had never taken Spanish in school. I had worked on an immigration
story for the paper- I was working in Roanoke, Virginia for the Roanoke Times
in 2006- so I took a couple of community college classes but they were really
basic. You know, it was once a week for a few hours. So when I came here… I was
definitely, I would say from being at the orientation, the lowest Spanish
skills of the other grantees. Some of them had traveled and lived in Spanish
speaking countries or studied throughout university or some of them had grown
up speaking Spanish at home. So that was certainly one of the big challenges
when I started. And language wise, the other challenge is that some of the
families that I’m working with don’t speak Spanish very well because it’s their
second language. They speak their indigenous language which I know nothing
about. So often, at the beginning especially, I was approaching a lot of
families on the street and I would have to translate through their 8 year old
son and you can imagine the message, how it changes from whatever I was saying
in my bad Spanish, to an 8 year old’s translation! I have no idea what they
were hearing. So there were definitely some challenges. Of course it’s a lot
better now. I’m a lot more comfortable with the language. And it’s just easier
to communicate now. But certainly it was a tricky part starting.
Lee: Well, Josh, if you will, kind
of walk me through what a typical day is like for you.
Josh: Well, a typical day for me I
guess is some kind of shooting pictures or video. Now I’ve got about 6 or 7
different projects going on. Some of them I can only do at certain times- some
of the families don’t live here. One of the families is coming for healthcare
because they have a child with hydracephala which is when fluid surrounds the
brain and it’s pretty serious. But they don’t live here. So when they come for
their doctor’s appointments, I put time aside and I’ll go with them to the
hospital and spend a full day with whatever they’re doing. And then other
projects are people that live here and some of them I go to their homes and I
just pop in whenever I want. Others of them I don’t know where they live, I
know where the work so sometimes I go to intersections where I can find them
and sometimes they’re not there or they’ve moved. But mainly it’s shooting. I
get up and listen to NPR a ways and then I go out and shoot for a good part of
the day. Basically it’s out in the community and then what we’ve started doing
recently is making a couple of trips to some of the communities where the
people come from because that’s the other part of the story, to show where they
come from and why they’ve left. So that’s kind of my focus here the rest of the time. I’ve got
a couple of trips planned in June and July and hopefully one coming up soon
here to Toluca,
another family.
Lee: Talk a little bit about that,
how you set up those relationships and how you established those relationships,
to be able to go to their homes and shoot their lives essentially.
Josh: Yeah, well, it’s a personal
thing. Some people are very comfortable with being approached on the street.
There’s one family I’ve been working with for a pretty long time that I just
walked up to, gave my pitch and it was fine. And after 6 or 7 times there, I
proposed to go home with them and that was fine and it’s been easy. Other
families are more reluctant. Some of them just kind of politely say no and I
keep seeing them, and visiting them and some of them finally open up. But the
main thing, just like when I worked at the newspaper, you’re best access is if
you can have someone mediate the first meeting. So either a mutual friend or
social worker, someone who knows them already that can vouch for you. That’s
kind of the easiest way to work.
So this organization
Codeni knows quite a lot of families because of the kids that come to them so
they’ve been really great about introducing me to people. And then some of them
are really well connected in the field of social work here so from that I’ve
gotten lists of other NGOs that work with other communities and you just kind
of go through people that you know and sometimes you get lucky you know.
Lee: Yeah. That’s awesome. Are
there any skills that you feel that you’ve learned as you’ve been abroad or as
you’ve been in Mexico and if so what are those skills and how are you going to
apply those to life post-Fulbright?
Josh: Well I guess namely it’s been a
time to step away from- I worked for about 14 years as a newspaper photographer
so it’s been a great experience to step away from that daily life, the daily
routine of shooting daily stories and work on longer term projects. And I guess
it’s opened my eyes to the kinds of stories and topics that I’m more interested
in, children’s rights for one, healthcare, and kind of rethink what I want to
do with my career. Now that I’ve got a lot of experience working at a daily
newspaper, it’s really opened my eyes to some other options. For instance,
teaching. This experience teaching the kids has just been amazing. So I’m
really interested in returning and trying to find work as a teacher. And
continuing on projects that I believe in and trying to figure out how to do
that. And you know, the opportunity to be a volunteer for so long and not have
to worry about finding a job and making money during this year, and just
saying, oh yeah we’ll do things for volunteer. My wife and I have been working
with sort of a side project, a cooperative of women artisans. It’s just kind of
a great time to step away from your normal concerns and worries in life and do
some things that have always been in the back of your mind- someday I want to
do this, or someday I want to do that. And here you are and you can actually do
some of that stuff. And it’s temporary, you have to return, but at least you’ve
had experience and you can apply that to what you do when you return. I think
both of us are looking for a big change in our lives, in what we want to do,
just looking for a new challenge too just kind of opens your mind to other
things.
Lee: And just in closing, can you
give, just give the listening audience a little bit of advice about what they
can do to prepare for the Fulbright, applying for the Fulbright program. There
are a lot of students out there who are maybe thinking about doing the program
but aren’t quite sure whether or not they want to fully commit to it. What
advice could you give to such individuals?
Josh: Yeah, I guess there’s a couple
things that… Not being in DC or New York I wasn’t able to attend any of the
meetings, but fortunately they’re all on podcasts. So, I recommend first of all
you read every single webpage on the site, everything you can and listen to
every single podcast, from all the meetings, cause there’s some really great
messages about clearly what to do and what not to do. For me, I also went
through all of the past few years list of people and tried to contact everybody
that had applied in the area that I was interested in. And I contacted a bunch
of them and several of them sent me their proposals so I could read them, a lot
of them gave me good advice and encouragement so that helped a lot too. And I
think the main point of the application that maybe isn’t as understood as it
should be is that you have to be as specific as possible. So just writing
something that says I want to go to Turkey and do some interesting
things there and not being very specific about what you’re going to do and
who’s going to help you, and how you’re going to do it is not going to work.
Because my understanding is that the application process is 80% of it. You
know, I don’t get checked up on every week, nobody’s calling me and asking me
to see what I’m doing here. So they want to do their homework up front and make
sure that you’ve got a legitimate proposal. So for one, finding people that are
in the city, in the country where you’re going to be that can write letters for
you, vouching that your project is real, that you can do it, and that they’re
going to help you. I found a couple professors and some social workers that
wrote letters for me. So you know, anything they recommend you do, just change
it in your mind to it’s required because it’s competitive and you’re going
against a lot of intelligent and talented people who have good proposals so I
think it’s really important. The other thing, it’s going to be reviewed by a
group in country so finding a project that’s seen by the people in country as
being interesting and relevant and timely is also important. Because I know
there’s sort of two rounds of the process and one of them is a committee in
country. So finding a proposal that they see, as “oh yeah that is interesting.
We need more people to study that,” I think is really important. But basically
just doing everything you can to read absolutely everything on the website,
listening to all the podcasts, and then making contacts in country. And do
things very, very early cause it’s really time consuming. A lot of the time
you’ll write some one and they won’t write back for several weeks. So plan
ahead, make all the contacts you can initially, and then quadruple check every
single thing on the application because I get the impression from some of the
podcasts that a lot of people are dismissed from errors or from laziness. So
anything you can do to make it in tip top shape only helps in the end.
Lee: Exactly. And those are a lot
of really great tips there. And so I hope people take your advice and are
listening to these podcasts, and as you said are starting early and making sure
they’re securing those affiliations as well.
Josh, that’s all the
time that we have today. I just want to thank you once again for taking time
out of your day to chat with me.
Josh: You’re welcome. I look forward
to hearing it.
Lee: Well this concludes this
episode of My Fulbright Life. Hope you tune in next time. Good bye.
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